Vincent de Tourdonnet

Studio Demo: The Train Must Never Stop

From The Real McCoy

Konrad Pluta, Thom Allison, Jewelle Blackman, Nicholas Murray, Andrew Moodie

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Credits-The Train Must Never Stop
First Studio Demo from the musical The Real McCoy
Adapted by Vincent de Tourdonnet from the play by Andrew Moodie
Music by Lal, remixed and engineered by Nicholas Murray
Vocal arrangement and direction by Konrad Pluta
Featuring Thom Allison, Jewelle Blackman and Andrew Moodie

Recorded at Draft Tattoo 2008.

The Real McCoy is currently under development as a unique new full-scale musical. Adapted by Vincent de Tourdonnet from Andrew Moodie’s hit play.

The story is driven by the contemporary downbeat electronica of the Toronto-based group Lal, as well as by other forms of popular music, in collaboration with Lal’s Nicholas Murray.

Demo Scene set-up
1880’s, south-western Ontario. Elijah McCoy is a bright young man whose parents escaped to Canada via the Underground Railway. He is awarded an engineering scholarship to a Scottish University. Moving subsequently to an America torn by abolition, Elijah has been denied employment commensurate with his training. He has been working as a locomotive oilman, where he has come to know Don Bogie, another black man who also works the trains. In a previous scene, we saw an irate white woman try to insist that they start the train again, and cease from stopping it every ten miles. They explain to her that it must stop, as all trains did in the late 1800’s, because of the need to constantly re-lubricate the engine. A way had not yet been found to keep steam engines internally lubricated.

Elijah has married Anna, and they are being paid a visit at their home by Don Bogie.

Part-way through the scene, Elijah sips tea alone off to one side, when he notices a hole in the bottom of his tea-cup.